“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself
but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat” (SunTzu the Art of War, 544-496 BC).
Although written for the managing of conflicts and winning clear victories, this basic guideline can be directly
transferred to our battle against apicomplexan parasites and how to focus future basic research in order to transfer
the gained knowledge to a therapeutic intervention stratey. Over the last two decades the establishment of several
key-technologies, by different groups working on
Toxoplasma gondii
, made this important human pathogen accessible
to modern approaches in molecular cell biology. In fact more and more researchers get attracted to this easy
accessible model organism to study specific biological questions, unique to apicomplexans. This fascinating, unique
biology might provide us with new therapeutic options in our battle against apicomplexan parasites by finding its
Achilles’ heel. In this article we argue that in the absence of a powerful high throughput technology for the characterisation
of essential gene of interests a coordinated effort should be undertaken to convert our knowledge of the
genome into one of the phenome.
